Maafa Remembrance

HICAGO, Feb. 8  A slave ship rises in the east, a
testament frozen in time and sun-washed stained glass.

At the New Mount Pilgrim Missionary Baptist Church on
Chicago's West Side, the ship is personified in the Christlike
figure of an African man. His muscular, chain-draped arms are
outstretched. His body, from his torso to his calves, is the pit
of a ship, drifting across the Atlantic Ocean with a cargo of
men and women, sardine-packed and bound for slavery.

The window is a symbol of the middle passage, the route
through which millions of Africans traveled, many of them dying,
on their way to slavery in America.

On Sunday mornings, when the Rev. Marshall Hatch stands to
preach in the pulpit in this building, formerly a Catholic
church; when members of his congregation lift their eyes and
voices; when the spirit is high and the cadence ripe, their new
stained-glass window stands as a reminder of how far they have
come as a people.

As the service begins, the deacons bellow a cappella the
Baptist call to prayer, "I love the Lord, he heard my cry." The
congregation responds in Southern-bred harmony, "I, I, I love
the Lord." The light shines through the mural.

Leaders at this church are embracing their past and intending
to teach their children about the black presence in the Bible,
while trying to become part of a continuing national dialogue on
reparations for African- Americans. So they installed the
stained glass, from an illustration by Tom Feelings for his
picture book on the middle passage.

The project, which cost $30,000, is called "Maafa
Remembrance." Maafa, a Swahili word pronounced may-AH-fah, means
unspeakable horror and is used to refer to the horrors of the
trans-Atlantic slave trade, just as Holocaust is used to refer
to the deaths of millions of Jews at the hands of the Nazis.

Last Friday, the National Reparations Convention opened in
Chicago. Organized by a Chicago alderman, Dorothy J. Tillman,
the convention, held over the weekend, was a gathering of black
political and civil rights leaders, local and national, who
drafted a proposal for officials in Washington on ways to
compensate African-Americans for the enslavement of their
ancestors.

Mr. Hatch's stained-glass window is part of a wave of
projects in the last 10 years at black churches across the
country to replace white figures with African figures in
biblical art and stained glass. The effort has been spurred in
part by Afrocentrism and a growing body of literature about
blacks in the Bible.

In adding black art and icons, in some cases a black Jesus,
to their churches, black religious leaders seek to make
Christianity relevant to their congregations, who seek hope but
sometimes find little solace in the idea of worshiping a white
Jesus, given the history of slavery and racism in this country.
Mr. Hatch and other black preachers hope that depictions of
their slave past can help connect worshipers to God.

"I was there at some point," Mr. Hatch, 42, said recently,
standing in the church's sanctuary, staring at the slaves
depicted in the stained- glass window. "I was in somebody else,
but I was present. That's my theology. It makes me whole to
remember that this is what I've come through to get where I am.
Then this passes down to our children.

"If we don't do this going into a new millennium, the memory
of these people can be easily forgotten. So we take their memory
into the new millennium, and we also become a part of the
contemporary discourse on how to repair African people, the
reparations movement."

The effects of placing African art and stained glass in black
churches run deep, said the Rev. Gregory Thomas, 53, an adjunct
faculty member at Harvard Divinity School.

"It's very important for people of color, but also others, to
see that there are other icons and that they see themselves
within those images," Mr. Thomas said. "These are just pictures,
but they have powerful meanings about God preserving. That's why
the middle passage picture is so important, and we need to tell
our children what this means."

"There are many people who say, ĀWell, you have to get over
that and move on,' " he said. "That's a mistake for us as a
people and for our country to deny and not understand."

Others agree. The Rev. Melbalenia Evans, executive minister
at Trinity United Church of Christ in Chicago, which has
undertaken a $500,000 project to install stained-glass windows,
said the images of blacks as biblical figures, slaves and
patriarchs in the church are "priceless in terms of letting
young people look up and see themselves in roles that are
positive and affirming."

"It is priceless in terms of what it does to one's
psychological mind- set," she said.

It was in a bookstore while he was on sabbatical in 1999 at
Harvard Divinity School that Mr. Hatch stumbled upon "The Middle
Passage: White Ships Black Cargo" (Dial, 1995), a narrative art
book by Mr. Feelings. Mr. Hatch was overpowered by the image,
which now fills his church's east window. In his neighborhood,
where poverty and crime run deep, he hopes the image will be one
of hope.

Even for the artist, seeing the window at the New Mount
Pilgrim Missionary Baptist Church at a dedication ceremony seven
weeks ago was moving. Mr. Feelings, 67, of Columbia, S.C., said
he had not been to church in years because he was "turned off"
by the images still prevalent in black churches.

"Any black person who goes into that church and sees that
image realizes that we're bound together in this particular
way," he said, adding that his art had never been used in a
church until now. "Even though it's a painful experience, out of
it comes this positive spiritual connection."